THURSDAY 03/06
Finally made it to Donegal. The roads cross-country can be very slow but at least the weather was good. The borderlands are quite hilly, nothing too high but can be quite steep. They are largely a result of glaciation - when the ice sheet started to retreat as the climate warmed up, it dumped millions of tons of rock and debris to form whole series of hills.  The landscape is completely different to that on the mainland. In the UK there are large fields with  the odd tree but here the opposite is the case. The fields are very small and almost hidden by trees and hedges or dry stone walls. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of crops being grown either. There are cattle everywhere and they eat the ordinary grass but being quite boggy ground (even on the hills!) there is the dark crappy grass that only grows in the wet and even the cows hate it so you end up with these weird fields of neatly mown grass filed with isolated bundles of foot-high crappy grass.

As you get closer to Sligo, the terrain changes from forested hill farms to more open land with mountain ranges hemming the coastal towns close in to the ocean. The Atlantic coast is always windy  but in he coves it can be quite calm, protected by long fingers of hilly land  dotted with trees. Donegal sits in some of the most dramatic scenery in Ireland and I took quite a while going round Lake Eske and along the Blue Stack mountain range to the NE of Donegal.

Cameras have gone full circle. The old TLR types (like the one Antosh brought in) focus on a screen and you often need a dark cloth over your head to see it properly. The modern equivalent is the LCD screen on digital cameras. They aren't very bright and are hopeless in the sun. A lot of work is going into making the screens brighter but the sun is still over a million times brighter so it won't make much difference. I started using a dark cloth over my head when taking pictures and found it much easier to use the screen. Fortunately, there is nobody around to see you do this in remote parts of Ireland. Try the same thing in Croydon and you'd be asking for a kicking...

As the sun began to set, I back-tracked through Donegal and then along the coast road, making detours into the unlisted roads that go right along the shoreline. Some are dead ends but are well worth going down. They are very badly kept and at times so rutted that you run the risk of grounding out the bottom of your car unless you take care to drive on the ridge rather than in the ruts. As you get into the remote areas, there is a strange mix of ancient and modern. A housing boom at the moment means that extensive house building is going on throughout the region, with some being of almost mansion proportions. But literally next door there can be the crumbling ruins of a previous generation. There isn't much work in these parts and there have been mass exoduses before from here (not just from the Famine).

I struggled to find somewhere to stay this evening as it is a popular area for foreigners and the Irish alike and this weekend is a bank holiday here in the Republic.